#angelicism01

A new kind of artist is emerging—one who harnesses and focuses the energies of a scene.

In the past, a master painter might command a workshop of apprentices. The master painter, in a quasi-managerial role, handles high-level vision and planning work, but delegates out much of the actual painting to his workshop. The workshop is an highly bounded economic unit, with formal admissions processes and pay.

This new breed of artist emerges from subcultures that are already producing art, often for themselves, without any formal economic structures supporting them. Rather than slowly working up, over a lifetime, to the status of master painter, this artist self-elects as “focusing” and aggregative force, purely by fact of prodigiously collaging everyone he comes into contact with.

In the past, it was common that one or a small handful of artists from a given scene would mainstream. Although their aesthetic sensibility and style were developed alongside and in discourse with the scene, these artists were members of the scene; they did not explicitly take the scene itself as subject for representation.

This new breed of artist explicitly takes the scene itself as subject for representation. He focuses scene creativity, and converts oral culture to text, meatspace to cyberspace. He may resemble an ambassador and translator between the subculture and the mainstream. He may resemble a museum collector, or an art curator, or a collage artist. He may resemble a looter, an exploitative capitalist, a Judas. Traduttore, traditore, the expression runs—“Translator, traitor.”

The prototype for this new kind of artist is Andy Warhol, with his Factory & Superstars. Today, due to the proliferation of “worlds” online, this position is becoming increasingly common as a form of cultural arbitrage across subcultures. Artists are beginning to mine 4chan, degen Discords, and meme subreddits for textual sources, often compiling quasi-documentarian for later showing. The creative energies of virtual worlds (e.g. Eve, Second Life) are being compressed into gallery shows. One of the best examples of such an artist today is Angelicism01; we can excerpt here from Sierra Armor’s essay on his recent Film01, which takes scene-girls as its subject:

I have never been in a movie before, but, like all girls, I desired to be in one… When I heard a clip of an authentic voice message I sent Angelcism, begging him to put me back in the movie, I felt slightly nauseous…

—Justin Murphy, “On Angelicism”

These two disparate paragraphs from a long essay point in two directions for the intellectual or writer today: 1. seek hearers among the populace outside declining institutions; 2. seek hearers among the elite of emergent institutions. 

In other words, in a world increasingly without the state-subsidized institutions of mass education and mass media that stabilize “the public,” the intellectual’s choices are either to found a cult or to advise the prince. 

Pragmatically, Murphy is right—what are either you or I doing here, reader, if he’s wrong?—but there is a problem all the same. 

If I can say the hidden name, I am reading Peter Thiel’s famous book Zero to One right now. In it he advocates definite optimism, which is when you—“you” for the purposes of his text means ambitious start-up founders, would-be princes—determine a set of specific long-range goals and work toward them resolutely. 

Definite optimism’s antonyms are the indefinite optimism of contemporary American liberalism and libertarianism (keeping our options permanently open), the indefinite pessimism of Europe (dithering while expecting the worst), and the definite pessimism of China (saving against the inevitably grim future). There’s even a helpful chart:

And I am perfectly sure this is how you should run a company or a country. But I don’t think you can do serious work in art or thought this way. Art and thought’s goal is art and thought. Art is not the map we make when we get back; it’s the journal we kept on the voyage, sometimes scribbled rather hurriedly as we tumbled over a waterfall. It’s not a map at all, really: it’s more territory, territory invisible except that the artist recorded it. 

What the prince does with it is out of our hands—though the political critic will hold us responsible for it anyway—but, because it’s not rationalized, it doesn’t constitute actionable intelligence. If he wants to understand—by which I mean to interpret—the prince, too, will have to enter the labyrinth. And if we had gone there as the prince’s spy or trouper, the whole landscape would have turned its back on us, and rightly so. 

The final interview w/ the mind behind the Milady project, and a cautionary look into the latent demonic alchemy inhabiting the internet. This conversation is something I hope will help people understand: that unless we address the existential questions that turn us into victim/executioner, nothing will fundamentally change.

Listened to the above on today’s walk. I still don’t 100% grasp what happened but I appreciate the—to borrow a much-abused phrase—moral clarity that emerged from this conversation, or at least, to be blunt, from one side of it. If you listened to the last episode of GPA, the one with Default Friend, where we touched briefly on the issue, this is a helpful follow-up.

One of Honor Levy’s new poems, which I shamelessly pinch from Crumplar’s SubStack. I had to swipe it because the speaker of this poem (I say it with affection) is literally the political persona of my podcast co-host. 

Crumps writes up his attendance at a Dimes Square scene literary reading. He also gets into Angelicism01, also discussed on the latest episode of Grand Podcast Abyss. His opening riff on Christian Lorentzen NFTs is really funny; elsewhere, he plays up his tedious shitlibbery that the equally tedious acerbity and opacity of “The New Conservatism” was invented to contest. Here he is on Levy:

Honor is an “angelicist” writer, and I think she does a much better job of it than the main Angelicism01 substack. (I’m not going to try to define the nascent angelicist movement just yet but will refer to a piece by Satya Paul, who gives a good insider explanation even though he’s somewhat uncritically intoxicated by its heady aesthetic promises). Part of what makes Honor’s angelicist writing good is that it lacks this shrill “male” anger you see in Angelicism01 or Barrett Avner’s writing where their “schizoposting” sometimes drifts into Nick Land pastiche and such banalities as complaining about Brandon beating Drumpf. Even at her most obviously political in poems like “Amerikin,” she manages to snipe at pronouns without getting cringe. Honor is still a crazy reactionary but she does so by adopting the character of the “Girl Joker,” a catty zoomer bitch that is also terrified of being abandoned by God. Riffing on the impossibility of living up to the reigning ideological constellation of femininity, she conjures these transcendent apocalyptic visions without needing to use the language of Heidegger or Deleuze as an obvious crutch. “E girl egregore so sweet so solemn sorbic acid sucralose sodium citrate I taste you through the screen… where are you going? follow for follow?” What a Poggerz tour through hell!

Agreed on the Heidegger/Deleuze for the most part, though I can throw that stuff around too when I’m in the mood. You have to read Portraits and Ashes, where the academics get poisoned to death by the art installation after they’ve spent 10 pages have an impromptu theory seminar on it. Probably the meanest, funniest thing I’ve ever written. Disagree on the anti-masculine countersignaling. The masculine has its place—anyone who doesn’t think so lives in too small an emotional world—as does the capital-P political, which in America means party politics and not whatever illusory commitments (“I want more politics in art, not less, because I want communism”) our scene tourist still harbors. 

(I’m a scene tourist at second hand, yes, but you have to keep an eye on these things. Even in the digital rhizome, literary/intellectual culture spreads west from the East Coast commanding heights, much as they’re tottering these days.)

And for your audio pleasure, a new episode of Grand Podcast Abyss. The official description:

A “fun” episode. The churning world of internet gossip. Justin Murphy and independent intellectual life. Cryptocurrency. Curtis Yarvin. Angelicism01. The vibe shift. Schizoposting. The independent intellectual’s two choices: found a cult or advise the prince. Peter Thiel, patchwork, and the sovereign corporation. Who is Peter Thiel funding? “He’s going to suck the adrenochrome right out of Dasha.” Compact magazine. Confusions of right and left. Post-left sympathies and antipathies. New single: “Come on the Pod.” The Supreme Court. Clarence Thomas, The Exorcist, Arlen Specter, Corey Robin, academic constraint. “What is a woman?” A powerful story about Josh Hawley.